In the article, Holding Corporate Leadership Accountable for Worker Safety Crimes by Gabriele Wohl, Don Blankenship was charged with conspiracy for violating coal mine safety regulations. He was caught lying about his statements in Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing, and making material misstatements and omissions to investors. According to Wohl, Don Blankenship was the Chairman and CEO of Massey Energy company for about 10 years. During his time at the company, he cared less about the safety regulations and more about outperforming his competitors. As a result, this lead to the prohibition of spending time or money on safety regulations and limiting resources for non-production needs. There were many challenges with charging
Don Cherry, born and raised in Kingston Ontario, is known for his openness, often debatable and always amusing commentary. Mr. Cherry can be seen weekly during the National Hockey League season. He has a segment during the first intermission, every Saturday on CBC's Hockey Night In Canada called the Coach's Corner.
Schwarze, S. (2003). Corporate – State Irresponsibility, Critical Publicity, and Asbestos Exposure in Libby, Montana. Management Communication Quarterly, 16(4), 625.
It is obvious that executives and managers at both British Petroleum and Transocean have changed the civil right statement “by any means necessary” to reflect their desire to make profits. The unethical behavior that has been engrained within both business cultures calls in the question the ethics of all powerful oil based companies. Leaders must be attentive and adhere to all safety and maintenance concerns. The damage and loss that was incurred could have been avoided if executives would have made more logical and ethically based decisions. Leaders should be able to recognize their psychological tendencies and correct them when making ethical decisions for their businesses. Through striving to make ethical decisions, organizations can set the tone for company morale and success.
chief executive for World com and the Enron Corporation scandal, Ethics are moral duties that
The three main crooks Chairman Ken Lay, CEO Jeff Skilling, and CFO Andrew Fastow, are as off the rack as they come. Fastow was skimming from Enron by ripping off the con artists who showed him how to steal, by hiding Enron debt in dummy corporations, and getting rich off of it. Opportunity theory is ever present because since this scam was done once without penalty, it was done plenty of more times with ease. Skilling however, was the typical amoral nerd, with delusions of grandeur, who wanted to mess around with others because he was ridiculed as a kid, implementing an absurd rank and yank policy that led to employees grading each other, with the lowest graded people being fired. Structural humiliation played a direct role in shaping Skilling's thoughts and future actions. This did not mean the worst employees were fired, only the least popular, or those who were not afraid to tell the truth. Thus, the corrupt culture of Enron was born. At one point, in an inter...
...The Sarbanes-Oxley Act deals with the proper filing of financial paperwork along with rules and regulations to follow while working as a top business (The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, 2002). Some of the consequences that derived from the Act include fines and possible imprisonment up to 20 years for destroying documents. It also made it a crime to destroy corporate audit records. Since the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was in place at the time Bernie Madoff was charged with security fraud, he received 25 years in prison for his wrong-doings (Bernard Madoff, 2014). These crimes by Madoff and Enron have made for safer business practices and stricter laws. However, to ensure cases of this magnitude do not occur again, companies must not only abide by mandated law, they must develop a culture deeply rooted in strong ethics. Character matters in a business just like it does in people.
Ivan Boesky pleaded guilty to the biggest insider-trading scheme discovered by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). He made 200 million dollars by profiting from stock-price volatility on corporate mergers. What he actually did was cheat by using illegally obtained secret information about impending mergers to buy and sell stock before mergers became public knowledge/ Although insider trading is nothing new, the SEC knows it has become a threat to the public’s confidence, and they must enforce regulations to stop criminal activity. The SEC has put pressure on managers to regulate information leaks, promising strict legal enforcement if a business fails to police misuse of privileged employee information.
She starts her argument by rejecting the idea that “it is sometimes difficult to locate the specific corporate agents responsible for a criminal act (171).” The rejection is not meant to infer that it is always easy to find the person at blame, but simply that this point has to do with prosecutors evidence and not the philosophical issue. Jennifer believes that because responsibility is spread throughout many different areas in the corporation, and decisions follow the same path, “there may in fact be no individual or group of individuals that is “justly to blame” for the crime (171).” The idea that many of us notice everyday, in many cases we as employees act blindly in accordance with policy, not exerting any control over the situations, and can therefore not be held accountable. In this respect the corporation is to be held accountable.
The Pinto Fires Case centers around events that transpired more than 30 years ago. The impact of these events proved extremely important to America business history. Fortune Magazine called it one of the 20 business decisions that “helped create the business world as it is today.” (Managing Business Ethics: Straight Talk About How to Do It Right) The resulting aftermath directly contributed to the development of both consumer activism and protection. (Managing Business Ethics: Straight Talk About How to Do It Right)
One may ask, how is that different from the “Enron” scandal? There isn’t much to separate these two, it could be said that they are cousins. They both managed to cover their debts by overstating their revenue and profits and using other companies they owned to make profit or at least attempted to, but ultimately drowning in debt and committing fraud. What makes these two companies different would be the cooperation of the executives with the prosecutors or officials, which goes back to why Andrew Fastow only faced 10 years because he took a plea deal. On the other hand I believe 25 years for conspiracy, misrepresentation of statements and 7 counts filing false statements was well deserved because not only did that make a statement to the public, but in the eyes of the law Ebbers should have learnt from “Enron’s”
Tyco provides products and services across the world. The company is global and diversified providing a variety of products including electronics, healthcare, fire and security services and engineered products and services. While employing over 250,000 people worldwide they grossed approximately $40 billion in revenue in the year 2005. In 2002 Tyco was involved with the corporate scandal where the management mis-appropriated corporation funds. The previous CEO Dennis Kozlowski was convicted in 2005 on 22 counts of the 23 that he was charged with. This is an example of not only a legal issue of responsibility but also one of an ethical issue that the Tyco Corporation has had to face. In the face of the legal and ethical issues that this mishap had placed the corporation in, Tyco placed Ed Breen in as chairman and CEO. Mr. Breen joined the company in 2002 after the scandal and immediately began the rebuild of the company’s name. With the appointment of Ed Breen and his changing of the company’s ethical standards (to be discussed in the next portion of the paper) he promotes the legal responsibilities of not only the company’s employees but the responsibilities of the suppliers and buyers to report any wrong doing. This reporting also speaks to the ethics of the Tyco corporation employees as well as those of the companies th...
In many circumstances, employees’ behaviors are likely to follow their leader. Enron’s leadership has been extremely influential due to exemplified charismatic. For example, Heffrey Skilling and Kenneth Lay, CFO and one of executive member in Enron, greatly encourage employees to follow their lead. Their incompetence accounting profession directly affects lover level of employees. Eventually, those manipulating accounting activities affect company collapse. Once leadership has done unethical professional accounting behaviors, unethical acts become accepted. Employees have many reasons for remaining quiet. While Enron still have ethical internal rules, when leadership in Enron did not abide and did not provide corresponding example of employees to follow (Prentice 2003, p. 417). Which eventually make Enron’s become one of the largest corporate scandal frauds.
In the aftermath of Enron, Washington Mutual Bank, TYCO, and World Comm these companies went against the grain of what good ethical behavior is and what their respective company’s code of ethics were. The criminal justice system has made it clear that it will not allow companies and their executives to get away with the misuse of public trust by allowing them to make themselves rich at the expense of the employee. Where these crimes are both ethically and morally wrong, the CEO’s of major corporations are being punished by a ...
Was it unethical practices, poor governmental regulations, or bad organizational behavior that lead Kozlowski to make the decisions that lead to the 2005 conviction? Vasile (2004) defined business ethics as “learning what is right and what is wrong and simply doing what is right” (p. 2). However, the actions attached to the decisions are not always as easily derived. In most instances, leaders are faced with making the decision as to what is...
White-collar crimes and organizational structure are related because white collar-crimes thrive in organizations that have weak structures. According to Price and Norris (2009), the elites who commit white collar-crimes usually exploit weaknesses in organizational structure and formulate rules and regulations that favor their crimes. Makansi (2010) examines case studies to prove that white-collar crime is dependent on organizational structure. For example, the financial crisis that Merchant Energy Business faced in 2001-2002 occurred due to the liberal Financial Accounting Board, which failed to provide a standard model of valuing natural gas and fuel. Moreover, a financial crisis that rocked the securitization market in 2008 was due to fraudulence in the pricing of securitization products. These examples ...